Recycling the leftovers

By Stephanie Strom, New York Times

May 30, 2014

Photo: Photos By Kalim A. Bhatti / New York Times

A student at Dickinson College disposes meal leftovers into trays for recycling in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Public and private programs are working to put excess food to good use, either donated to the hungry, sold as biofuel or turned into compost.

A student at Dickinson College disposes meal leftovers into trays...

Every week, some 14,000 households in Austin dutifully roll not just one, or two, but three garbage bins to the curb.

One bin is for recyclable materials and one for trash. The third bin is filled with food scraps that will be taken away and turned into compost, part of the city's goal to eliminate 90 percent of the waste it sends to landfills by 2040.

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Residents also are encouraged to take a free home composting class in their neighborhoods or online, which earns them a $75 rebate on the purchase of a home composting system, and a similar program is in the work for small businesses.

“What has been missing from recycling is the organic part of the waste stream, which is significant,” said Bob Gedert, director of resource recovery for the city. “We were collecting yard trimmings from residents, but not food waste.” The compost is used as fertilizer.

Gedert hopes to extend the pilot food collection program to all 186,000 of the city's households. Austin already makes money from the sale of Dillo Dirt, a soil amendment made from the yard clippings the city has been collecting for some time.

The city brought in $267,000 from the sale of 21,000 cubic yards of Dillo Dirt in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, according to its water utility, which runs the sales program.

Food waste has become a hot-button issue, and restaurants, grocery chains, food processing companies, municipalities and the federal government are adopting strategies for reducing it.

San Antonio has its own organic waste program, a subscription service that began in 2013 and is being expanded to include all of the city. It's part of the city's plan to achieve a 60 percent recycling rate by 2025.

It started with a pilot program that distributed green bins to about 30,000 residential customers. Participants recycled organic material — from kitchen scraps to yard waste.

The city's Solid Waste Management department, in a 2013 report on its recycling efforts, reported that the pilot program kept 5,322 tons of organic material out of the landfill in fiscal year 2012. When the program was converted into a subscription service, only 300 of the pilot households chose to opt out of the program.

The city was expecting the rollout of the program throughout the city to take two to three years.

The Food Recovery Network, with chapters at almost 50 colleges, picks up leftovers from university dining halls to distribute to food banks and soup kitchens.

“The biggest challenge is this perception that it's either unsafe to donate surplus food or that they might be held liable for someone getting sick or that it would just be this extra cost,” said Ben Simon, the organization's founder and executive director.

Not surprisingly, colleges and universities are a hotbed of food recovery and recycling. Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, has had programs to tackle the issue since 2002, when Jenn Halpin, manager of the school's farm, began working to persuade dining halls to hand over their salad waste for composting.

From there, Halpin moved on to breakfast waste and educating students about the issue. In 2007, Dickinson's farm won a $97,000 state grant used to buy equipment including a food pulper, for shredding and drying food waste, and a truck and tractor for hauling and managing the mounting compost pile.

“Today, about 800 pounds of food are going to the farm to be composted, which is about one small dumpster each day,” said Neil Leary, director of Dickinson's Center for Sustainability Education. “That represents about a 50 percent reduction in waste going out the back door of dining services each day.”

The program also saves the school about $750,000 a year in transport and landfill fees, Leary said.

Cost savings like that have piqued the interest of food industry trade groups, which in 2011 established the Food Waste Reduction Alliance to educate restaurants, food manufacturers and grocery stores.

“The starting point was, as we all know and read, we have 6 billion people in the world today and that number is going to rise to 9 billion,” said Louis A. Finkel, executive vice president for government affairs at the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which along with the Food Marketing Institute and the National Restaurant Association, created the alliance. “Feeding 9 billion people is going to be hard enough, and wasting food in the process makes it unreasonably challenging.”